̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Kamiar Mohaddes

Emissions-free flying takes off at Cambridge Climate Challenge

plc32 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:11:42 +0000

A biology PhD candidate and an early career aerospace engineer researcher won the 2025 Cambridge Zero Climate Challenge for turning waste into sustainable jet fuel

Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic

plc32 — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:19:22 +0000

Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic, a new report from Cambridge Judge Business School, BCG and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s climaTraces Lab argues that failing to invest comes with significant economic consequences.

Allowing global warming to reach 3°C by 2100 could reduce cumulative economic output by 15% to 34%. Alternatively, investing 1% to 2% in mitigation and adaptation would limit warming to 2°C, reducing economic damages to 2% to 4%. This net cost of inaction is equivalent to 11% to 27% of cumulative GDP—equivalent to three times global health care spending, or eight times the amount needed to lift the world above the global poverty line by 2100.

“Research on climate change impacts across all regions and sectors is expanding rapidly,” said Kamiar Mohaddes, an Associate Professor in Economics and Policy at Cambridge Judge Business School and Director of the climaTRACES Lab.

Read: ̽��ֱ��compelling economic case

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) offer a strong case for investing in climate mitigation and adaptation to avoid damage to the global economy.

Research on climate change impacts across all regions and sectors is expanding rapidly

Kamiar Mohaddes

Front page of report

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��price of ecological breakdown

fpjl2 — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Cambridge researchers are investigating the economic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss, and identifying ways to drive a more sustainable global economy.

Innovation for Africa's Climate Future

plc32 — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 10:07:20 +0000

̽��ֱ��2024 Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Prize Competition recognises innovative ideas in agriculture, women’s health and digital technology.

COP must reverse rising pessimism over building sector decarbonisation

ta385 — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:05:00 +0000

Negativity on Twitter about decarbonising the built environment has increased by around a third since 2014, according to a new analysis of more than 250,000 tweets featuring #emissions and #building between 2009 and 2021.

̽��ֱ��pessimistic trend has followed the launch of major climate action reports. ̽��ֱ��study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, reveals that expressions of ‘fear’ in Twitter dialogue increased by around 60% following the launch of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2015.

̽��ֱ��researchers, from Cambridge, Boston, Sussex and Aarhus Universities and Caltech, also found that ‘sadness’ increased by around 30% following the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming 1.5˚C in November 2019; while debate in November 2020 over lobbying of builders and utility companies over non-compliance with new building codes in the US triggered a spike in ‘anger’.

Mapping tweets that caused spikes in emotional engagement revealed that public concerns triangulated around inaction towards emission reduction, the fairness of carbon tax, the politicisation of building codes (distinctively seen for the US) and concerns over environmental degradation. This demonstrates, the researchers argue, “a strong environmental justice discourse.”

̽��ֱ��findings appear on the heels of COP27’s building sector events (10th – 14th November), which sought to promote a just transition and enhancing building resilience with the tagline ‘Build4Tomorrow’.

Lead author Ramit Debnath, Cambridge Zero Fellow at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech, said:

“Major climate policy events including COP have emphasised how difficult it is to decarbonise the built environment and this has been reflected in the rise of negative feelings on social media.

“But our research also offers hope – we found that climate policy events can and do foster public engagement, mostly positive, and that this has the power to increase the building sector’s focus on environmental justice.

“To build for tomorrow fairly, global climate action has to incorporate and empower diverse public voices. Policy actions are no longer isolated events in this digital age and demand two-way communication. Policy events and social media have a crucial role to play in this.”

̽��ֱ��study highlights that the building sector is one of the most important and challenging to decarbonise. ̽��ֱ��IPCC suggests that restricting climate change to 1.5˚C requires rapid and extensive changes around energy use, building design, and broader planning of cities and infrastructure. ̽��ֱ��buildings and construction sector currently accounts for around 39% of global energy and process-related carbon emissions. ̽��ֱ��International Energy Agency estimates that to achieve a net-zero carbon building stock by 2050, direct building carbon emissions must decrease by 50%, and indirect building sector emissions must also decrease 60% by 2030.

But decarbonising the building sector is challenging because it involves a complex overlap of people, places and practices that creates a barrier to designing just emission reduction policies. ̽��ֱ��study argues that democratising the decarbonisation process “remains a critical challenge across the local, national and regional scales”.

“Our findings shed light on potential pathways for a people-centric transition to a greener building sector in a net-zero future,” Debnath said.

Using advanced natural language processing and network theory, the researchers found a strong relationship between Twitter activity concerning the building sector and major policy events on climate change. They identify heightened Twitter engagement around developments including: the Paris Agreement’s call for the building sector to reduce its emissions through energy efficiency and address its whole life cycle; COP-23’s ’Human Settlement Day’ which focused on cities, affordable housing and climate action; COP25’s discourse on green/climate finance for residential homes; and COP26’s ’Cities, Region and Built environment Day’.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that despite negative sentiments gaining an increasing share since 2014, positive sentiments have continued to multiply as Twitter engagement has exploded. Across the entire study period (2009–21), positive sentiments have fairly consistently maintained a larger share of the conversation than negative sentiments.

̽��ֱ��study highlights the fact that core topics covered by tweets have changed significantly over time, as new innovations, technologies and issues have emerged. Hashtags associated with COP26, for instance, included #woodforgood and #masstimber, as well as #housingcrisis, #healthybuildings #scaleupnow, and #climatejusticenow, all largely or entirely absent in Twitter conversations between 2009 and 2016.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that discourse on innovative emissions reduction strategies which remain uncommon in the building sector— including use of alternate building materials like cross-laminated timber; implementing climate-sensitive building codes; and the circular economy – inspired Tweets expressing ‘anticipation’.

“COP26 was an extraordinary moment," Debnath said. " ̽��ֱ��Twitter engagement surrounding the event connected public health, the circular economy, affordable housing, and decarbonisation of the built environment like never before.”

“We are seeing a paradigm shift in the building emission discourse towards broader social and environmental justice contexts. Reference to low-carbon alternatives to concrete, housing crisis, scaling-up and climate justice are all part of the growing social justice movement associated with healthy and affordable social housing narratives globally.”

̽��ֱ��study notes that considering the size of Twitter’s current user base (around 211 million users globally), the number of tweets about emissions in the building sector, remains relatively small.

“It’s crucial that policymakers raise the salience of these issues and develop communications strategies to emphasise the importance of climate action in hard-to-decarbonise sectors like the building sector,” Debnath said.

̽��ֱ��authors of the study intend to continue to analyse social media interaction with further climate policy events, beginning with COP27.

Co-author Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston ̽��ֱ�� said: “Some people dismiss Twitter as a poor focus of academic research, given its ability to spread misinformation and fake news. But we instead see it as a lens into the inner workings of how millions of people think, and rethink, about energy and climate change. It offers an incredible opportunity to reveal people’s true intentions, their revealed preferences, in unbiased form on a public forum.”

Co-author Prof R Michael Alvarez, Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech, said: “This is an innovative and important study, showing how an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars can use big data and machine learning to provide policy guidance on how to decarbonize the build sector. Research like this is critical at this time, to inform the debates at forums like COP27 and to energise additional scholarly work that can help further our goal of democratising climate action.”

Reference

R Debnath, R Bardhan, DU Shah, K Mohaddes, MH Ramage, MR Alvarez, and B Sovacool, ‘Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector’. Nature Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41589-022-23624-9

Social media engagement with climate policy events is vital to reducing building emissions and ensuring environmental justice, research led by Cambridge suggests

To build for tomorrow fairly, global climate action has to incorporate and empower diverse public voices

Ramit Debnath

Brian (Ziggy) Liloi. CC licence via Flickr

People installing a living roof in 2012

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge experts on UK drought and climate change

lw355 — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:25:55 +0000

From pollinators to profits, food to fires, here's what Cambridge experts say about the impacts of water scarcity – and what it signals about our changing climate.

COP26: Cambridge experts on their hopes for the high-stakes summit

sc604 — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:58:53 +0000

What will it take to make the high-stakes United Nations climate summit a success? We spoke with some of our researchers and asked them what they want to see at COP26, what some of the biggest challenges are in getting to zero carbon, and what gives them hope.

̽��ֱ��first 'climate smart' sovereign credit ratings

fpjl2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:53:59 +0000

Cambridge economists add climate science to Standard & Poor’s global credit formula and find that 63 nations face downgrades by 2030 unless action is taken to reduce emissions.